The challenges of reciprocity: Access,uncertainty,and politics

Reciprocity and exploitation in ethnography

Ethnographic research usually involves spending time in foreign social worlds. We enter these worlds as strangers, seeking answers and understanding about social phenomena, and leave them when we believe that we can answer our questions. While there, we query natives of these social worlds about their past experiences, motives, ideas, understandings, feelings, and dreams, hoping to use their answers and actions to advance our understanding of social life. Placed in these terms, ethnography can seem exploitative. Stacey (1988: 23), for example, grapples with this question in a discussion of the inherent contradictions in feminist ethnography, noting that “the lives, loves, and tragedies that fieldwork informants share with a researcher are ultimately data, grist for the ethnographic mill, a mill that has a truly grinding power.” Exploitation in ethnography involves viewing our research participants as merely research objects or vehicles for the investigation of some social phenomenon, rather than recognizing and taking seriously their agency and subjectivity. Rather than merely being unfeeling, cold, or objective, this relationship becomes exploitative as researchers accrue benefits through their time in these social worlds, in the form of prestige, publications, grants, and jobs (Amsters, 2019). However, as I noted above, this potentially exploitative nature of ethnography has long bothered ethnographers, to the extent that likely no ethnographer working today would practice ethnographic research in the purely exploitative terms laid out here.

While pure exploitation may be condemned, ethnographers continue to search for more equal and ethical approaches to ethnography (Bell, 2019; Huisman, 2008; McInch, 2020). Many of these approaches emphasize reciprocity, or the idea that participants should also receive some benefit from participating in research. Potential benefits to participants include everything from improved collective knowledge to political advocacy work to cash, but ethnographers tend to agree that “what reciprocity demands is likely to vary according to circumstances” (Hammersley, 2025: 346). The first challenge of reciprocity, then, is to identify what participants may want or need. A simple answer to this question is to ask participants what may help them. However, Hammersley (2025: 346) points out that “much of what participants may need, or feel they need, will be outside of what researchers are capable of supplying, or are obliged to supply.” Thus, we may find ourselves unable to provide our participants with anything they may want, raising questions surrounding whether reciprocal research is even possible in these situations.

A second challenge related to practicing reciprocity arises when we consider reciprocal acts in the field as opposed to reciprocal acts after or outside of fieldwork. As I noted above, this article focuses on the ‘ethic of immediate reciprocity’ (Gillan and Pickerill, 2012), and examines what acting reciprocally during fieldwork means. Although I believe that we have obligations to participants even after we leave the field, I also suggest that we do not solve challenges relating to exploitation in ethnography through reciprocal acts after fieldwork. The primary reason for this is that we cannot possibly know what the consequences of our research will be and we cannot always control these consequences. When we enter the field, we do not whether the work we produce will be well-read, if our advocacy will have any effect, or if the effects of our research will be positive rather than negative. We do, conversely, know that how we relate to and interact with our participants will likely have some effect on both their lives and our own.

Practicing immediate reciprocity involves two primary challenges. First, we must identify to whom we have reciprocal obligations. While the simple answer to this question is the people we interact with, it is less clear whether we have reciprocal obligation to them as individuals, as members of a specific group within a social world, or as members of a social world. In discussions surrounding consent in ethnography, Atkinson (2009: 20) argues that we cannot use individualistic modes of consent because we deal “with social actors because they are members of an organization, or are privy to some activity we wish to study.” If we do not believe consent should be individualistic, it is not overtly clear why we would view reciprocity as individualistic. However, this raises further questions in relation to the challenge above, as we must also consider what benefits may accrue to groups or social worlds from their participation in research, rather than just an individual participant.

The second challenge of immediate reciprocity revolves around where we set the limits of our reciprocity. This challenge becomes especially pertinent in studies of political movements or criminal environments (Blee, 1998; Dekeyser and Garrett, 2021; Fangen, 2020). Although a complicated relationship between research ethics and the law exists, there is nothing inherently unethical about performing fieldwork with participants engaging in illegal activity (Dekeyser and Garrett, 2018, 2021; Ferrell and Hamm, 1998). Similarly, there is clearly nothing inherently unethical about helping a political movement. However, complications arise when we must make decisions in the field about which acts we are ok with and which we cannot support. How we draw this line has clear links to what type of analyses we can do. We find a clear example of this in Alice Goffman’s (2014: 262) On the Run, when she discusses driving one of her participants around Philadelphia as he searches for the killer of his friend. Her willingness to help her participants allow her access to a world few witness. Yet, the ensuing controversy suggests that few ethnographers find it acceptable to help participants to (attempt to) commit murder, even if this is what they desire. While this is obviously a reasonable principal, more difficult questions arise in less clear-cut cases, and how we find our limits and draw this line in fieldwork is not always clear or obvious.

Finally, reciprocity also carries an inherent epistemological question. Namely, it is extremely difficult to know when we have acted reciprocally and when we have not. We may, for example, believe that helping our participants with an event or donating to their organizations suffices, whereas they may find these acts unhelpful or irritating. Conversely, participants may feel that they accrue benefits simply through research participation, even if we feel they have received nothing. Olivier de Sardan (2015: 35), for example, points out that informants do “not shun the use of active strategies enabling [them] to take advantage of the interview (to gain prestige, social recognition, or monetary returns, in the hope of future assistance, in view of legitimizing his own point of view).” While discussions surrounding reciprocity and exploitation in fieldwork usually assume that researchers have power over participants, recognizing the agency and subjectivity of participants also means acknowledging that they have their own motives and goals in research participation (Hammersley, 2025). Furthermore, research participants often exercise tremendous power in ethnography, as they control access to certain types of events, spaces, or information that researchers believe they need. Even in these situations where participants may have power over ethnographers, reciprocal obligations do not disappear. However, we may have fewer reciprocal obligations in these situations and believe that merely treating our participants well suffices in these cases. The challenge for ethnographers lies always in identifying what the goals and motives of participants might be and deciding what they might mean for our attempts at reciprocity.

These challenges arise in any attempt at reciprocal ethnography. However, these challenges also multiply when we acknowledge that researchers also “transport a personal world, which enters into contact, for a time, with the personal worlds of those with whom [they] work and live” (Olivier De Sardan, 2015: 122). We are always more than solely researchers in the field, and our participants also come to know and typify us as more than merely researchers. In the remainder of the article, I consider how this impacts reciprocity in fieldwork, emphasizing that the choices we make in situations where the meaning of reciprocal ethnography is unclear affect both our fieldwork and our analyses. Prior to this, however, I first turn towards describing the research project and fieldwork which prompted an examination of these questions.

Fieldwork in the radical left in Sweden

This article draws primarily on examples from a research project investigating and analyzing the everyday routines and habits of a radical leftist social movement in Sweden (Flaherty, 2022, 2023). The research examined both the ‘frontstage’ of the social movement, as I attended events like demonstrations, political meetings, and film showings, as well as the ‘backstage’ of the movement, as I accompanied participants to events like birthday parties, cookouts, and pub crawls. After an initial period of preparatory fieldwork in Fall 2017, the bulk of the fieldwork occurred between spring 2018 and spring 2020. During this period, with some small exceptions, I attended at least one event every week, and was usually present at 2–3 events per week, whether these were official movement activities or more informal hangouts. Prior to beginning this research project, I had attended several events hosted by organizations within this movement environment but did not have close relationships with any eventual participants. Initially, therefore, many elements of this environment were unfamiliar to me. However, after 2 years in this social world, I unsurprisingly developed both a better understanding of the movement’s culture and developed closer relationships with many of my participants.

In the planning and early stages of my fieldwork, the primary ethical considerations I discussed with colleagues and planned for revolved around questions of legality, informed consent, and attempting to minimize potential risks for the participants. Questions of legality arose primarily due to the position of the radical left in Swedish politics. Researchers usually class the Swedish radical left as an autonomous movement (Flesher Fominaya, 2007) or a radical left-libertarian movement (Jämte et al., 2020), consisting of a network of loosely connected organizations, affinity groups, campaigns and individuals with anti-capitalist ideologies (Jämte, 2017; Piotrowski and Wennerhag, 2015). The radical left prefers the use of direct action and pursues change in an extra-parliamentary manner (Flaherty, 2022). Furthermore, the radical left generally does not reject the use of violence, and at times, engages in violent confrontations with its opponents on the right and/or the police (Jämte, 2017). These political tactics, and its overarching ideology, have led Swedish state agencies to class parts of the movement and its adherents as violence-confirming extremists, and the movement has been subject to (primarily) soft repressive measures from state authorities (Jämte and Ellefsen, 2020). Therefore, although the overwhelming majority of activities that radical leftists engage in are legal, when planning the research, I discussed and considered situations where a demonstration might turn violent or where participants may discuss illegal activities. Similarly, I envisioned situations where participants might engage in civil disobedience, write illegal graffiti, or occupy buildings. In considering these potential situations and planning for how to remove myself from a situation if it became violent or participants crossed the lines of what I was comfortable with, I believed I was prepared for the major ethical challenges I would encounter in terms of legality. As I suggest below, this turned out to be false, but for reasons that I could not predict at the time.

My initial access to the field was dependent on members of one group in this movement. This group plays a key role within the radical leftist movement in southern Sweden, operating a book café which serves both as a movement free space and as the ‘public face’ of the movement (Flaherty, 2023). When I asked these initial participants about access, they did not have any explicit expectations or requests about the research beyond a wish that I act respectfully towards others in the space and that I respect the boundaries of what individuals were willing to share or discuss. As I began to spend time in this free space, I simultaneously also began to attend every public event held within this community (whether demonstration, lecture, or support party, amongst others). Over time, my presence in this space, attendance at these events, and growing contacts within the field led to further invites, opportunities for observation, and interviews. ¹ When I entered the field, I entered with the intention to practice reciprocity. Initially, I informed (potential) participants that I would share the results of the project both during and after the project through talks at movement locations but made no promises relating to reciprocity beyond this. Instead, I believed that opportunities to be helpful and ‘give back’ to the participants would arise during fieldwork, and I, in any case, wished to allow the participants to define what helpful actions may or may not be. For example, at times during the fieldwork, I was asked to assist individuals with university work or sit behind merchandise tables at different events. However, throughout the fieldwork, participants never made any expectations or requests relating to the research product or direction explicit. During the fieldwork, there were also several conflicts between different groups and individuals in the movement, although I was never asked to take sides. Yet, as I attempted to practice reciprocity, I found that unexpected interactions and events placed me in situations where neither general ethical principles nor ethics relating to reciprocity offered clear guidance. The remainder of the text therefore considers these situations, the choices I made, and their consequences as I explore what reciprocity meant in practice.

Access, legality, and reciprocity

As I noted above, we always possess more than identities than just researcher during fieldwork. However, while others may not initially perceive us as researchers, we are often able to establish this identity through a brief conversation. Thus, for example, when I attended a support party for an organization within the radical left, I had a standard approach I adopted when interacting with new (potential) participants. I revealed myself as a researcher, briefly described the research, and asked participants if they were interested in taking part or learning more about the project. Clearly, while this did not occur the same way every time, this ‘recipe’ for action (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973) did enable me to make clear that I did not necessarily belong to the same identity category as everyone else attending the party. This approach relies on ideas of control and predictability. It required me to find a moment to speak with this person and suggests that the person would be willing to listen to, and more importantly, acknowledge what I say. In most situations, these assumptions did not become problematic. Yet, during my fieldwork, I also found myself in a variety of situations that I could neither control nor predict what would happen next. This was most evident at demonstrations.

Attending demonstrations likely plays a key role in any fieldwork conducted within a social movement. Over the course of my fieldwork, I attended demonstrations regularly. The demonstrations ranged in size from fewer than 25 participants to over 10,000 attendees, addressing topics ranging from calls to end capitalism to rallies against cuts to school funding. As I discussed above, I was aware that radical leftist demonstrations could occasionally turn violent, that radical leftists could engage in civil disobedience, and that conflicts with the police could arise. Early in the planning of this research project, I decided that I could not ethically engage in violent acts (and additionally, had no real wish to) and that I wished to avoid interactions or conflicts with the police. Partly, I did not wish to be arrested or detained, but I also did not think the ethical lines of illegality were clear cut. Although there may be situations where ethical research demands illegality, I did not necessarily think that these situations were examples of this, and therefore believed that erring on the side of legality was the more appropriate strategy. Thus, prior to attending a specific demonstration, I made plans about what to do if a situation seemed to be turning violent and aimed to generally adhere to the exhortations and instructions of police officers, when this was relevant or possible.

However, I quickly discovered that while these ethical guidelines may have seemed reasonable in theory, they were of little use in practice. Demonstrations, instead, were unpredictable events. Particularly in the initial stages of my fieldwork, I quickly realized that demonstrations in the radical left did not adhere to my prior ideas about demonstrations, and I was forced to constantly modify my understanding of the ‘demonstration’ as I spent more time in this social world. Ethnographically, this is no surprise. Social worlds seldom conform to our initial ideas about them, and part of the ethnographic journey involves modifying and changing these initial theoretical ideas as we come to understand more about the social world in question (Blumer, 1969). Ethically, however, challenges arose as I grappled with what my obligations were to the participants, and more broadly, with how I could maintain my role as researcher. A useful example of these challenges occurred in an interaction with the police that took place near the start of my fieldwork. The following field note details this interaction, which took place at a counterdemonstration to a neo-Nazi march:

... As we left the park, Mats pulled out one of the maps we had received the night before. We stood in a circle in the street next to the park, looking at the map, and trying to figure out how to make our way to where we had heard some of the others were. As we discussed, a police van began to approach. I initially thought nothing of it—we were not doing anything illegal. The police van stopped directly behind us and four police officers stepped out. The police approached us and said that they were going to search us. They started with Sven. The police asked him if they would find anything in his bag. He replied that they might find a little something. The police found some flares, smoke bombs, and bangers in his bag. They asked for his id and remained near him. One of the officers went back to the van with his id. The police officers asked some questions about we were doing, and what we had planned. Taking my cue from the others, I stayed silent. The police did not appear to expect any answers. They finished searching Sven. They then began to search the backpacks the rest of us had. I had my notebook with me in my backpack. They did not ask for our ids though. They did not find anything. After this, the police officer in the van came back and gave Sven back his id. The police officers began to go back to their van, telling us to be careful and take it easy, prior to driving away. I exhaled. As we walked away, Mats mentioned how lucky we were. He showed me a banger he had managed to hide from the police, and said that if they had found it, we all probably would have been detained…

While this interaction with the police skirts the lines of legality, it also raises questions surrounding my obligations towards the different actors involved in this interaction. In this encounter, the police officers clearly treat me (in addition to the three participants) as alternatively a radical leftist, a potential criminal, or an extremist. Throughout this interaction, I make no attempt to identify myself as a researcher and reject these identity labels. Partly, I viewed any attempt at denying the identity forced upon me as futile. While I was unsure what the outcome of attempting to interrupt the police search to declare myself a researcher and explain a little bit about my research project would be, it did not seem as though it would be particularly helpful in the moment. More importantly, however, I also did not attempt to identify myself because of what I imagined as the potential consequences for my participants and my research. In interactions with the police or other authorities, I aimed to ensure that I did not do anything that may harm the participants and attempted to help ensure the interaction instead had a positive, or at least neutral, outcome. However, research ethics provides little guidance for how we should specifically interact with authorities in these situations. I therefore took my cues from the participants, copying their behaviors. I assumed that they were similarly interested in avoiding arrest or detainment (and we had, in fact, discussed this prior to the demonstration) and that their experience in these situations would guide their behaviors so that this outcome became likely. Therefore, like my participants, I stayed silent when the police asked us questions and attempted to do nothing the others did not do, fearing that an unexpected action may upset the delicate balance of the situation.

Furthermore, as Murphy and Dingwall (2007: 2225) point out, consent in ethnographic projects is “negotiated and renegotiated over time as the relationship between the ethnographer and the research hosts develops.” Although, Sven, Mats, and Jens may have consented to participate in the research project as of the demonstration, I suspected that if I abandoned (or attempted to abandon) our shared fate in this interaction with the police, they would not have been particularly interested in continuing to take part in the research project. The question that arises here revolves around what these actions mean for reciprocity. In this interaction, I lend my support to the actions of the participants, (possibly) helping them to ensure that we all benefit from not being arrested or detained. However, in doing so, I also conceal my identity as a researcher, accepting instead the identity the police place upon me as a radical leftist. These actions may perhaps be more properly termed solidaric rather reciprocal in this sense. Yet, this concealment and willingness to remain silent and solidaric in this encounter also have clear benefits for my research. It helped me to build rapport with my participants and made them more likely to invite or allow me to accompany them at other demonstrations. Occurring early in my fieldwork, this situation forced me to confront the idea that acting reciprocally meant, at times, rejecting or concealing my identity as a researcher. While the outcome of this situation had analytical benefits, accepting this claim also had analytical drawbacks, as I explore next.

Uncertainty and reciprocity

In an article exploring the role of the participant observer, McCurdy and Uldam (2014) describe a similar event to the one above. In their encounter, a member of a different social movement approaches one of the researchers and forces them into the role of a spokesperson for the movement they are researching. The researcher involved in this interaction also fails to disclose their identity as a researcher, rather than participant in the movement. This event similarly occurred early in their fieldwork, and the authors note that they were unsure about what to do or how to feel about their classification as a representative for the movement they were studying. This event, alongside other experiences, leads them to write that as ethnographers we need “to acknowledge how social context as well as our own feelings and emotions impact how we see ourselves, and in turn, how others may, or may not, see us as researchers. And such perceptions change over time” (McCurdy and Uldam, 2014: 45). They close their discussion in noting that after 10 months in the field, they “came to see [themselves] as more of an insider [within the movement]” and also “came to be treated as such” (McCurdy and Uldam, 2014: 45). McCurdy and Uldam highlight here that our understandings, identities, and positions change over time. We (probably) do not have the same perceptions of our participants at the beginning of our fieldwork as at the end, and similarly, our participants likely know far more about us than they did in the initial stages of the ethnography. Here, I consider how this changes our obligations as we attempt to act reciprocally.

Primarily, I argue that our obligations transform as our relationships with our participants develop. In our initial encounters with participants, they likely view us solely as the researcher interested in their lives and organizations, since they may know nothing else about us than our professional identity. However, as we actively work to build relationships in the field and spend extensive amounts of time with key informants, we come not only to know our participants better, but the participants also come to know about us and our lives. Several authors have discussed the lie of the ‘chaste ethnographer’ (Fine, 1993) as one example of this. However, a likely more common situation involves friendship (O’Connell Davidson, 2008). While we may not like all our participants, we are likely to become friends or initiate friendly relations with some of them, simply by virtue of spending so much time together. As researchers, we remain aware of our dual identities. Yet, our participants may forget that we initially entered the setting as researchers, rather than fellow participants. This potential challenge can become even more acute in the presence of drugs and alcohol (Joseph and Donnelly, 2012).

During my fieldwork, this occurred several times. Participants expected me to act not as a researcher, but instead as alternatively a friend, acquaintance, or fellow member of this social world. These situations lead to several dilemmas surrounding how to balance research aims with ethical obligations and what reciprocity means when we are not regarded as researchers. For example, towards the end of my fieldwork, I received a message from Laura, asking if I wanted to grab a beer together with John. Laura and John were two participants who had become key informants in my research project. Over the 2 years of fieldwork, I had spent extensive amounts of time with them, and thus knew about their jobs, their educations, their partners, and their current problems and successes in life, just as they knew about the various everyday ups and downs of mine. At this point in the fieldwork, I was primarily focused on wrapping up some loose threads that had arisen in the data collection. One of these threads revolved around romantic relationships in the movement, as I had begun to focus more analytically on feelings of intimacy that arose through participation in this environment.

However, when Laura wrote to me and I agreed to join them, I had no specific goal in mind with the meeting. While I imagined that we would likely discuss recent developments in the movement, and I had one or two questions I wanted to ask to Laura and John, I also viewed this meeting as simply a potentially enjoyable social situation. Yet, when I arrived, I quickly realized that the situation did not conform to my expectations. Laura had broken up with her partner, and I had clearly been invited to join in the traditional drowning of the sorrows. As the night wore on, other individuals, who were not key informants, but who had participated in the research in different forms, joined us. Unsurprisingly, the main topic of conversation that night was relationships, past, present, and possibly future. While this was clearly potentially an exceptionally useful source of information on a topic that I wished to analyze further, it was similarly clear that there was an obvious ethical problem. Although all the individuals present were aware that I was a researcher, and they had all consented to taking part in the research project at some stage, it was obvious that I was not perceived as a researcher in this moment. Furthermore, I felt that I could not reclaim my identity as a researcher in this situation, without potentially harming the participants. I thought re-identifying myself as a researcher in this interaction would not only be socially awkward but potentially cruel, if I suggested the only reason I was present was for research-related reasons.

As I considered this situation in the days and months that followed, I concluded that my reciprocal obligations to Laura, John, and the others present meant that I could not ethically use any of the things said that night in my research. O’Connell Davidson (2008: 63) argues that consent in ethnography implies complex negotiations since “nobody can fully predict…all the possible outcomes of engaging in a social and emotional relationship with another human being, and nobody can completely control the way in which such a relationship develops.” This unpredictability similarly affects reciprocity. Tillmann-Healy (2003: 735), discussing friendship as a method of ethnography, argues that “friendship as method demands radical reciprocity” and that we should “never ask more of participants than we are willing to give.” Although I had not set out to use friendship as a method, friendship had nonetheless developed. For me, acting reciprocally in this situation meant acting as a friend, rather than a researcher. This meant listening, sympathizing, and commiserating rather than probing and analyzing. Similarly, I certainly would not want my drunken ramblings after a breakup to form the basis of a research text. If I would be uncomfortable with the objectification of these intimate reveals, I felt that I could not request it of others.

One potential solution to this dilemma would have been to ask the participants present that night for permission to use their stories. While they may have granted it, I did not do this since I viewed this as opposed to the reciprocal ethic I attempted to practice in my fieldwork. Using these emotional narratives as data felt uncomfortably close to exploitation, particularly since none of the participants were imagining me as a researcher in this situation. Furthermore, I was unsure how much others may remember or wish to acknowledge what they said. Dredging up certain comments, actions, or stories did not seem likely to be received as sympathetic or reasonable, and I thought that it may instead be perceived as unfeeling, cold, or cruel. At the same time, I do not claim that this is the only ethical way to act in this situation. Rather I argue that this situation illuminated a particularly stark contrast between my research aims and my understandings of what reciprocity meant. Similar situations arose, at times, throughout my fieldwork, forcing me to confront the idea that acting reciprocally meant, at times, abandoning the role of researcher and instead embracing roles such as friend or confidant. Although the participants’ conceptions of me changed throughout the research process, I realized that these changing obligations and attempts to give back also dealt with my changing conceptions of the participants. As I first entered the field, I imagined my participants almost solely as social movement participants and imagined reciprocity in these terms, thinking about giving back through help with text editing, translation, or making coffee at meetings. However, as my relationships with the participants developed, and I came to know them as complex social actors, encompassing many different identities, I realized that my attempts at reciprocity needed to take these other identities into account as well. While giving back at times may mean translating a text, at other times, it came simply to mean listening to someone complain or commiserating over a beer. Yet, even as my understandings changed and developed, I grappled with finding the limits of reciprocity and balancing maintaining other obligations in relation to my research aims. I therefore now turn toward the issue of limits.

The limits of reciprocity

The previous two sections have considered how our other identities, like friend, fellow participant, or potential radical influence our practice of reciprocity. This section addresses the other side of that equation. In fieldwork, we are always researchers. As researchers, our ability to act reciprocally has limits, whether we discuss acting reciprocally towards an individual or a group. For example, during my fieldwork, I was often asked to translate or to look over translations of texts between Swedish and English, as I am a native speaker of English. This involved everything from translating brief descriptions of events like support parties or demonstrations to helping to translate political statements or texts into English. This is a standard example of the type of reciprocal act many ethnographers have in mind when they discuss reciprocity. Members of the world I am studying approach me for help with a task that suits my competences, and I provide this help, as thanks for their current or future participation in my research. While this description may make this interaction sound overly transactional, it highlights that giving back often entails both helping when participants ask for help and helping with tasks where we have some expertise.

Potential ethical complications arose here due to the overtly political nature of the texts I was translating. In translating these texts, I am, at a minimum, granting tacit support to the group I study. If I were solely a participant in this social world, this would be an entirely unproblematic situation. As researchers, however, we may study groups who promote ideologies or political opinions that we find distasteful or undesirable (in my current research project, for example, we are examining radical right-wing populism). This raises the question of how we decide which reciprocal acts we can and should perform, even in situations that are not reliant on intimacy.

As I considered reciprocity, it became clear that I would not have felt comfortable translating similar types of texts to the ones above if I had been studying a radical right-wing movement. However, I cannot justify this choice due to research ethics. Instead, this limit arises solely out of what I feel comfortable with as a social actor. Researchers who study far right movements have long grappled with these types of questions (Blee, 1998; Fangen, 2020; Simi and Futrell, 2015). Discussing her fieldwork in a Norwegian far-right movement, Fangen (2020: 248) suggests that she may have avoided this ethical dilemma as she was “from the start…open about the differences between myself and them, rather than trying to hide them.” She argues further that this choice had methodological benefits, as she suggests that the participants “would have been more skeptical if I had tried to give the impression of being one of them” (Fangen, 2020: 246) and that this choice made ethical sense for her research, since she did not have to keep up a covert façade. Fangen therefore seems to engage in no reciprocal acts like the translations I describe above, and her participants do not seem to have expected her to engage in this type of act. This, then, may solve any potential ethical complications that may arise regarding reciprocity. If we are open and honest about our positions, participants may not ask us to perform tasks that we find ethically problematic and may not expect our help for tasks we find distasteful.

Yet, we also must accept that remaining committed to other identities will have methodological and analytical consequences and that these consequences may not always benefit us. Similarly, it may simply be impossible to extend the same level of reciprocity to all groups. While this is similar to discussions surrounding positionality or personal ethnographic equations (Hannerz, 2013), we are seldom explicit about the limits we place on ourselves ethically to the same degree as we discuss our gender, age, or class. Ethnographically, these ethical decisions and views can potentially be at least as important for our abilities to produce data as any of our other social positions.

Although Fangen may not practice reciprocity in a transactional manner, she does engage in a type of intimate reciprocity. She notes that “occasionally, participants would tell me things that they would not tell each other” and that “some participants contacted me frequently on a private basis, and wanted to chat over a beer” (Fangen, 2020: 247). As I discussed in the previous section, the primary dilemma I encountered with intimate reciprocity revolved around how to draw boundaries between what could ethically be used in research and what could not. Here, Fangen makes no mention of struggling with this dilemma, despite becoming a confidant for some of her participants. She writes that when activists worried about how she would present their intimate details, she replied that “yes, I did learn a great many intimate details about them, but that I would focus on treating such information confidentially and anonymize details that might allow anybody to recognize them” (Fangen, 2020: 247). At least in this retelling of her fieldwork, Fangen seems to remain, and crucially, be allowed to remain primarily a researcher.

In comparing Fangen’s experiences with my own, a striking contrast appears. Fangen’s relationships with her participants remain clearly defined and her obligations to participants appear clearly bounded. Conversely, as I built relationships and ties that entangled other identities beyond researcher into my relations with participants, obligations seemed to grow. These developments created clear challenges for acting reciprocally. While I do not argue that researching groups we dislike is easier than those we sympathize with, I do suggest that sympathizing with our participants may create more ethical challenges. Olivier de Sardan (2015: 123) notes that emotional immersion is “not controllable by professional norms” and that “each person manages [it] according to his character, tastes, emotions, intuitions, sensitivity, and relational skills.” In fieldwork, we are not solely researchers, but we are also never only friends, confidants, or acquaintances. We often find ourselves unable to control which identity we enact, as our participants define interactions and situations that force us out of comfort zones. How we manage these identity conflicts, and how we are allowed to manage them, plays a critical role for the type of data we produce and the types of analyses we write. Where we set the limits on which interactions, which reveals, and which intimate details can be included in texts varies according to how much we privilege our identity as researchers at the expense of other identities. While reciprocity neither will nor should look exactly the same between two studies or even two participants, explaining how and why we set these limits is crucial for methodological, theoretical, and analytical reasons.

Conclusion

Reciprocity in ethnography takes many forms. In my fieldwork, I helped radical leftists with translation work, students with essay writing, friends with moving, and fellow demonstration participants with avoiding arrest. However, reciprocity quickly becomes complicated when we consider our multiple identities and as our participants enact other aspects of their identities than the ones we are specifically interested in studying. As their identities shift across interactions and situations, our relationships with them also change, leaving us with different obligations and expectations depending on the situation. I struggled throughout my fieldwork to find the right balance between my obligations as a researcher and any other obligations I may have had. In this process, I came to believe that these other obligations must take precedence over our research aims at times. As I attempted to practice an ‘ethic of immediate reciprocity’ (Gillan and Pickerill, 2012), my interpretation of this ethic meant that my obligations as a friendly ear or a fellow demonstration participant were just as important as my attempts to produce data that allowed me to describe and analyze this social world.

This article investigates what reciprocity meant in concrete terms during my fieldwork and explores some of the consequences of these choices. I do not claim that I made the only or obviously ethical choices. Other ethnographers may have analyzed situations differently and made other choices, leading them to produce slightly different representations of this social world. It is here that the challenges of reciprocity lie. While most ethnographers advocate for practicing some form of reciprocity, what this means is often unclear in the concrete situations we inhabit. We must make decisions in a moment about how we should act, with general principles about reciprocity and exploitation of little use. Like consent, reciprocity requires constant negotiation, as our obligations to participants, groups, and social worlds change and transform during fieldwork. I have argued here that one way to consider reciprocity is to discuss when and how we privilege our identity as researchers and when we privilege other identities. The way we balance our multiple identities has clear and direct impacts on what we produce. Rather than discussing abstract principles, discussions about reciprocity should focus on concrete situations where we discuss our choices and consider how these impact our research products. Although we never cease to be researchers in the field (Hammersley, 2025), we are also never solely researchers. Recognizing and taking this reality seriously means discussing how we placed limits on our actions and how we balanced any competing obligations we may have to participants. While completely reciprocal relations may never be possible for researchers, we should still strive to be as reciprocal as possible. At times, this may mean privileging helping our participants at the expense of interesting or important data, causing our research to suffer. Hopefully, however, this means our participants will not.